Dedicated Cloud Instances Added to Amazon's Web Service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today launched its EC2 Dedicated Instances in response to the fact that some enterprise customers don't want to share computing resources across the cloud.

Dedicated Instances works within Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, which lets customers run Amazon resources in a self-defined virtual network. With Dedicated Instances, as the name suggests, customers can select dedicated compute resources on hardware allocated for their use.

Customers "have asked for hardware isolation so that they can be sure that no other company is running on the same physical host," wrote AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.

Barr explained that selecting a dedicated instance when the VPC is built will ensure all instances launched within that VPC run on single-tenant hardware. Once established, he noted, that tenancy cannot be changed.

"It is important to note that launching a set of instances with dedicated tenancy does not in any way guarantee that they'll share the same hardware (they might, but you have no control over it)," he wrote. "We actually go to some trouble to spread them out across several machines in order to minimize the effects of a hardware failure."

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.